Go is a lowest common denominator language designed by a large company to make programmers expendable. It's ironic though because we all know how that worked out after Sun tried it with Java and what we now have some 20+ years later.
a tremendous number of production systems written in Java, being used by a tremendous number of people, and making a lot of money for corporations?
That's the goal of Go. It's not for research, it's not for discovery: it's for dominating the marketplace. If Go replicates Java's fate, it will have succeeded at its goals, because it's goals are to be used in production systems run by corporations.